You might be thinking visually without even recognizing, because to call that kind of imagination visual (as in optical) is misleading. A Hydrogen 2 molecule has 6 degrees of freedom already, give that color and you have 8.

There was a story on HN about activity in the "visual" system of blind people. Here is a similar story google spit out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720225

Commutative diagrams are a development that has applications in algebra, too. I'm currently reading Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone (J. C. Baez, M. Stay) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317525